Electronic computers, electronic communication devices, media, and protocols, and many different types of software applications and electronic services have been developed and have rapidly evolved, during the past 60 years, to form the infrastructure of modern information distribution and a large portion of modern commerce. Computers have evolved from very large, power-inefficient, and low-computing-bandwidth mainframe computers of the 1950s and 1960s to a wide array of economical, power-efficient, and versatile computing systems that feature enormous computational bandwidths, data-storage capacities, and data-transfer bandwidths. Early low-bandwidth proprietary data-transfer devices and communications media have evolved into the Internet and World-Wide Web, by which hundreds of millions of computers distributed across the surface of the earth are interconnected and exchange data at rates sufficient to support real-time streaming of movies as well as many millions of commercial transactions per hour. Mobile telephones have evolved from relatively simple communications devices to sophisticated, multi-processor mobile computing platforms interconnected by radio-frequency communications and wireless carriers with connectivity extending to traditional land-line telephones, the Internet, and personal computers.
The availability of wireless communications, mobile-computing platforms, and other modern technologies provides the basis for even greater evolution of processor-based devices and migration of computing and communications technologies into many new types of uses and applications. However, because computing technologies and platforms and wireless-communications technologies evolved from different initial starting points and were initially separately commercialized, there may be significant technical and commercial barriers to extending computing and communications technologies into new markets, uses, and applications. Researchers and developers, device and systems manufacturers, and a variety of vendors and service providers all continue to seek new methods and technologies to facilitate cost-effective expansion of computer and communications technologies into new markets, uses, and applications.